On the Web

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“Linux in Government” by Tom Adelstein—how is Linux progressing on
the local, state and federal government levels? What initiatives are
underway that feature open-source software? Which government agencies
are embracing open source and Linux, and what companies are helping
them do it?

“At the Sounding Edge” by Dave Phillips—the
author of The Book of Linux Music &
Sound explores new audio technology and
helps you find the best tools for recording, mixing,
editing and playback—even tools for your lessons
and practice sessions.

“OOo Off the Wall” by Bruce Byfield—you've made the office suite leap to
OpenOffice.org. Now what? Learn tips and maneuvers for
making your documents look better, and save time with tools and options
not even offered in other office suites.

“cat/dev/DiBona/brain” by Chris DiBona—what's
on the mind of this man on the Linux scene whose
distinguished résumé includes VA Research, Slashdot
and Google? Fighting spam, showing how to get
the most out of .org pavilions (the best part of
tradeshows) and many other things.

Mairix:

“It's in my old mail somewhere” isn't good enough.
Add a powerful search feature to your mail without
switching mailers with this simple command-line tool.
You can search for any text or for words that appear
in certain headers.

To use Mairix, edit a short config file to specify
where your mail folders live, then run it without
arguments to build the index. Run Mairix with an item
to search on, and it puts copies of search results in
a match folder that you can browse in your mailer
like any other mail folder.

Globulation 2:

This real-time strategy game breaks away from the
Warcraft style, where you select units and give
orders. Instead, you create a building site or
other task and specify how many of your amoeba-like
units you want to work on it. Based on units you
have available and their skill levels, the game will
assign units and tasks.

There's a beautiful level editor that creates
interesting random terrain, but the computer players
are still fairly dumb. Globulation 2 supports network
play, and development seems to be happening rapidly.

They Said It

People's stereotype [of the typical Linux developer] is of a male
computer geek working in his basement writing code in his spare time,
purely for the love of his craft. Such people were a significant force
up until about five years ago.

Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent
businesses protect business models based on old technology against
creative destruction by new technologies. And they're doing it by
manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the
telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile. But now, because
of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and
the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process
is being manipulated by incumbents.

This adoption of free software to resolve incompatibility between the
economic need for provider diversity and the engineering need to avoid
product diversity is, I think, fairly unique across all industry. I
can't think of similar examples.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Red Hat has decided to release their newly purchased
Global Filesystem (GFS) clustering filesystem under
the GPL. This project has had a checkered past.
It started out as a GPLed project from Sistina,
but the company changed its license in 2001 to the
Sistina Public License, which required a licensing
fee to be paid to Sistina in the event of source
code redistribution. Among various outcries at that
time, Alan Cox claimed the license change violated
the copyright of his own GFS contributions, and the
OpenGFS Project sprang up, using the last GPLed
version of Sistina's code. During the next few years,
Sistina made some effort to market GFS in its new
proprietary form, including partnering with CommVault
in 2003. In 2004, Red Hat bought the code from Sistina
and has now re-released it under the GPL. Back in
2000, GFS was considered a likely candidate for
inclusion in the official Linux kernel; now that it
is available again, Red Hat is keen to submit it for
inclusion once more. This time, it looks as though
the code will stay free.

Linus Torvalds has proposed a new patch attribution
convention, which looks to be achieving an early
success. The goal, as he puts it, is to enable kernel
developers to track the history of a patch, in the
case of charges of copyright violation. There's no
confusion over Linus' inspiration here. He and others
have had to spend a lot of time debunking each of
The SCO Group's charges of copyright violation. Doing so
has, until now, involved much wading through ancient
mailing-list archives. Linus' suggested attribution
system, which appears to be being adopted fairly
widely after only a brief discussion, simply involves
developers including their names on patches to
indicate compliance with the kernel's
license. Each patch will have one name for each
developer who edits it before it is included in the
kernel. This way, any future charges of copyright
violation can be investigated by examining the patches
themselves, rather than trying to trace each patch's
history through mailing-list discussions. As of
this writing, many developers are using the system,
although so far there has been no need to use the
newly gathered data.

Randy Dunlap has introduced a new wrinkle into
the old idea of saving .config information in the
kernel itself after compilation. His idea is also to
include data on the kernel version, as well as the
date compilation took place. The initial struggle to
get .config information into the kernel was fraught
with controversy, due to the argument that such
data also could be stored outside the kernel. With
that part of the controversy resolved, the
suggested addition of Randy's new data is finding a much
warmer reception. In fact, a number of developers
have remarked that the idea itself should have been
obvious long before. It seems a deeply embedded part
of human nature that even the obvious
often must have its initial discoverer.

Jeff Dike's User-Mode Linux (UML) is having some
technical difficulties making its way into the
official 2.6 kernel tree. Apparently, Andrew
Morton is
more than happy to accept Jeff's patches, although Jeff
appears to be having trouble splitting the patches
into acceptable chunks. Jeff himself has said that
he has “painted himself into a corner” with regard
to his UML work; the problem, he says, is finding
the right tools to manage the patch split. The UML
patch has become so large that splitting it up
has become a major undertaking. This actually is
a typical occurrence with large features. Often,
insufficient effort is given toward preparing the
patch for inclusion, and when the developers finally
feel the time is right, they discover they have a
ton of additional work to do before the patch
even will be considered. This usually engenders much
controversy. Jeff is no stranger to the issues
involved, but even knowing the requirements, it
is still difficult to split patches into atomic
pieces that each either fix or implement a single
thing. Clearly, UML is destined for inclusion in 2.6,
but these difficulties may result in significant
delays.

John A. Martin has maintained the CREDITS file
for quite a long time and has been acknowledged
in the MAINTAINERS file for that reason as well;
but the CREDITS file now apparently has become
self-maintaining, no longer requiring any specific
maintainer. Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton and the
other kernel maintainers have taken over much of
that role, and developer patches often include their
own updates to the CREDITS file, without requiring
anyone else to add them. The CREDITS file has, quite
simply, become a fully adopted element of kernel
development. Back in the old days, when that file
was first conceived, the task was much more daunting,
because there were so many contributors not mentioned
in it. Now that it has established itself, its current
listing is much more accurate. John graciously stepped
down when Adrian Bunk pointed out that a maintainer
was no longer needed; although John said he would be
willing to resume maintenance should the need arise
in the future.

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